10 Web Performance Audit Tips for Your Next Billion Users in 2018

Performance is our major concern in 2018 as web engineers. What our users perceived as fast, has changed over the last decade and good experience is becoming as competitive as the product itself.

More people come online everyday and a good percentage of them do not have that super-fast internet connectivity. Hence, we cannot build for only users with good internet connection in mind if we’re still discussing performance.

Remember:

There are users on mobile who might commute on your website

There are users who are in developing or under-deveoped regions who can only afford poor 3G connectivity or worse

There are the next generation users who are still understanding the values of the internet and getting on it gradually

These categories of users are grouped under one umbrella called the Next Billion Users. This term was coined by Google to promote an effort of building with this users in mind.

Performance is contextual. This means there is no silver bullet to building with performance in mind. Instead, you need to understand who your users are and how your user use or might use your product before considering how best to build a performant system.

Nonetheless, there are tips you can use as checklist to get your website generically performant. You can be rest assured that with these tips, you should hit some goals on engaging users. With time, you can the use stats to measure how users behave and in turn, improve to give them a better user experience.